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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Dust and Peace” Sunday, June 8, 2008 |
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Matthew 10: 5-15
Rev. |
We
think of Jesus as loving, forgiving, patient, compassionate, and surely he is
all these things. But he
can also be tough. You see
this in some of his sayings, like “Don’t throw your pearls before swine.” (Matthew
7: 6) A candidate who said something like that would be cut up into little
pieces on the blogosphere, am I right? “Don’t throw your pearls before
swine.” It is a tough statement. It
didn’t seem to faze Jesus if people walked away from him. He didn’t go
running after them. Jesus could be tough. You can
see this in Jesus’ instructions to his disciples when he sends them out as
missionaries, especially in his instructions to them as to what they should
do in the face of opposition, adversity and defeat. He has
two instructions about this. He
says: “Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and
stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is
worthy let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace
return to you.” What an
interesting instruction! If the house is worthy, give it your peace, but if
it is not worthy or hospitable, let your peace return to you. Then
the other instruction: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your
words, shake the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town.” These
are Jesus instructions to his disciples about how to deal with opposition,
adversity and defeat. Tough words. We are
in the middle of a sermon series right now on Jetsam and Flotsam on the The
idea has taken me to a number of Scripture passages that deal with what we
need to let go of and what we need to hold on to in order to survive the
storms of life. This week the idea of
jetsam and flotsam has taken me to these instructions of Jesus to what we who
are his disciples should do about opposition, adversity and defeat. I find
Jesus’ first instruction on this absolutely fascinating: As you travel from
town to town sharing good news and healing and bringing resurrection and
sanity, find a household that will let you stay with them, Jesus tells his
disciples. If the household is worthy, let your peace come upon it; he says.
But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. When we
are part of a household, a workplace, a neighborhood, a congregation, our
peace becomes intertwined with the peace of that household, workplace,
neighborhood, congregation. We give the groups and communities with whom we
spend our lives our peace. If the
group turns out to be inhospitable or adversarial, Jesus says let your peace
return to you. Share your peace with others with whom you live and love and
work and play, but don’t let them take it away from you. In the face of
opposition or adversity, let your peace return to you. Let’s
think of some examples. A
friend once told me that he had figured out how to find peace in his
marriage. As a result of a lot of introspection and therapy, he said, he had
gotten to the place where he was waking up in the morning feeling serene and
happy to be alive. The only problem, he said, was that his wife came
downstairs every morning while he was reading the paper and she would talk
about all the things in the house that needed to be fixed, all the bills that
needed to be paid, all the problems that had to be fixed. He said she would
leave the house every morning feeling better after having got all these things
off of her chest. But after listening to all of this he would feel depressed
and discouraged the rest of the morning. But he
told me he had solved the problem. How? I asked. He said that he realized he
has two options every morning – to either stay asleep until she is out of the
house or else to get up early enough to be out of the house before she got
downstairs. He let his peace return to him. We
bring our peace to our intimate relationships but when they become conflicted
and adversarial, we let our peace return to us. I want
to say a word about this to parents this morning. I learned this, insofar as
I actually did learn it, the hard way. Share your peace with your children,
but don’t give your peace away to them. When you are parenting, there will be
lots of times you will need to stop and let your peace return to you. The
times I regret the most as a parent were the times I allowed my children to
take my peace away from me. Sometimes they figured out how to do things that
just kept me agitated inside. Say hypothetically you had a child who decided
to stop tying her running shoe laces for 6 months and it became a daily
battle between you and her as to whether or not she would tie her shoe laces.
Hypothetically. Set limits on your children, discipline them, but do it after
you have let your peace return to you, not while your peace is somewhere
else. Don’t let your children take
your peace from you. Share
your peace with your workplace but don’t let your workplace take your peace
away from you. The Episcopal priest Garret Keizer in his book about anger
entitle The Enigma of Anger says
“When I look for people who have their anger under control…what I find most
often are men and women who love their work.…Persistent anger, perhaps even
more than persistent depression, is the sign of someone living contrary to
his or her vocation.”[ii]
Work becomes a breeding bed of anger, he says, when we make an idol of
work...when we think work will save us. If our work is making us angry or
depressed, we can let our peace return to us in our workplace if we stop
giving it the power to save or damn us. Share
your peace in your congregation but don’t let church take your peace from
you. During my years on annual conference staffs I experienced a great irony.
I would be invited in by churches to help them face problems and issues of
one sort or another. Often I would ask people why they come to church. I’d
get many different answers: To pray, to grow, to know God, for community, to
serve. When I was invited in to work with highly conflicted congregations, I
would get the same answer to this question with amazing predictability. In
highly conflicted congregations, when I would ask people why they come to
church, the answer with an amazing degree of regularity was “To find peace.”
Isn’t it ironic? People came to highly conflicted congregations to find
peace. They would say: “My life is full of stress and strife all week long. I
want my church to be a sanctuary where I can find peace.” And these would be
the most highly conflicted churches. Why?
Because we can’t find peace out there somewhere not even in church, it has to
be inside of us. If we are trying to find peace out there, the way we end up
trying to do it is by trying to control our environment to make it peaceful,
and as soon as you have a group of individuals all trying to control their
common environment you’ve got conflict. What do
we do when we face opposition and adversity at home or at work or at church?
Jesus says we let our peace return to us. Peace – your peace and my peace –
is flotsam. In the storms of life, our inner peace will keep us afloat until
we can make our way to shore. We can share our peace but we shall not give it
away. In the
face of opposition and adversity, the first thing that you and I are to do,
Jesus says, is to let our peace return to us. We are no good to anyone unless
we are living out of a centered peaceful self. Our peace is flotsam. But no
matter how hard we try in our relationships, there will always be those that
fail. Jesus has an instruction for
this too. “Shake the dust from your
feet.” I am
not a beach-goer anymore. I do not like vacations at the beach much. The
reason is that no matter how hard you try to be careful and to clean up, you
will be finding sand in your car and on your clothes and all sorts of
unexpected places for weeks and weeks to come. It is the same for me with
Christmas trees. I avoid them if I can because no matter how careful you try
to clean up after you’ve thrown it out on Epiphany Day, you will find pine
needs here and there for weeks to come. Defeat
and rejection and failure are like this spiritually. Unless we really shake
the dust off of our feet, we will find defeat polluting our lives for years
and years to come. Defeat,
rejection and failure are just part of life. I was listening to a podcast[iii]
of a mother speaking this past Mother’s Day. She had asked her grown children
what they wish she would have done differently. One of the things they told
her was that they wished she had let them face their failures. They said they
were part of a generation in which everybody got a trophy, and they wished it
had been more okay to fail and to lose. When it is not okay to fail, every
failure pollutes your life. Stanley
Hauerwas says that one of the implications of Jesus’ instruction about
shaking the dust off of our feet is this. He says: “The kingdom, it seems,
grows through rejection. Success is not a sign of faithfulness.” Defeat
and rejection and failure are a worthy part of life. Our instructions are to learn
from defeat, to shake the dust of it from our feet and to move on. Otherwise
we make an idol of success so that defeat devastates us, and it can pollute
our lives for years to come. I am
very aware this morning that there are few of us here, if any, who are not
wrestling with something or someone threatening our peace. Maybe it is family
or work, but someone or something is threatening to take our peace away from
us. I am
very aware this morning that there are surely some of us who have recently
experienced failure in our lives…a relationship that has ended, a job that
didn’t work out, a job we wanted that we didn’t get, a campaign that was
lost, a child who is distant, a friend who is not there for us right now. So we
listen quietly to Jesus this morning. He says, if the house is not worth, let
your peace return to you. He says, Shake the dust of defeat from your feet
and the kingdom will grow in you. May we
find the grace the hear him and to follow him. www.foundryumc.org |
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